President Donald Trump said he would personally intervene to try to help a prominent supporter with his cancer treatment.
Scott Adams, who created the workplace-set comic strip ‘Dilbert’ in 1989 and who revealed in May that he had prostate cancer that had spread to his bones and expected to only live months longer, said in a social media post on Sunday that he would be asking Trump for help to bring forward his treatment schedule from Kaiser Permanente, after the California-based healthcare provider “dropped the ball” in scheduling his intravenous infusion. The cartoonist said he had been approved to be treated with Pluvicto, a targeted radioligand therapy used to treat prostate cancer that was approved by the FDA in 2022. Adams appealed to Trump to reach out to Kaiser and get them to “respond and schedule it for Monday. That will give me a fighting chance to stick around on this planet a little bit longer.”
“On it!” Trump posted on Truth Social on Sunday, with a screenshot of Adams’ X post. Prior to Trump’s post, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. responded to Adams on X: “Scott. How do I reach you? The President wants to help.” Trump’s son Don Jr. also had responded to Adams’ post on X: “Going to make sure that my dad sees this. We’re all praying for you, keep fighting!”
It’s not clear how Trump will be able to intervene. TIME has reached out to Kaiser Permanente and the White House for comment. The medical provider, which said it has treated over 150 patients with Pluvicto in Northern California, told Reuters that Adams’ oncology team “is working closely with him on the next steps in his cancer care, which are already underway.”
Some on social media have criticized the Trump Administration for personally responding to Adams’ appeal while stripping research institutions of public funding that has fuelled scientific breakthroughs like Pluvicto. The drug was developed by researchers at the German Cancer Research Center and University Hospital Heidelberg in Germany, while research at Purdue University and Johns Hopkins funded through the U.S. National Cancer Institute and National Institutes of Health contributed to its development.
“It is not a cure,” Adams said of Pluvicto. “But it does give good results to many people.” Adams has not yet publicly responded to Trump’s post.
Here’s what to know about Adams and his connection to Trump.
Longtime cartoonist
Adams created Dilbert in 1989, while working at California-based telephone service provider Pacific Bell. The now-68-year-old became a full-time cartoonist in 1995, after the strip grew in popularity across the U.S.
Dilbert was adapted into an animated TV series of the same name in 1999, which was helmed by Adams and Seinfeld writer Larry Charles. The series won a Primetime Emmy Award in the year it premiered, and ran for two seasons on UPN before being canceled in 2000. In 2020, Adams claimed that the show had been canceled because he was white and the network wanted to cater to Black American viewers.
Adams has since gained controversy over other comments related to race and politics, many of which he made on his video podcast Real Coffee with Scott Adams and on social media. During a February 2023 livestream, Adams referenced a Rasmussen Reports poll that asked respondents if they agreed with the statement, “It’s okay to be white.” The phrase has been associated with the alt-right movement after it gained popularity in 2017 and has been co-opted as a slogan by white supremacists, according to the Anti-Defamation League. After pointing out that 26% of Black respondents disagreed with the statement and 21% were unsure, Adams called Black people a “hate group” and said “the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people; just get the fuck away.”
In the same episode, Adams also said he moved to a neighborhood with a “low Black population” and that “it makes no sense whatsoever, as a white citizen of America, to try to help Black citizens anymore.”
Several newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the USA Today Network, as well as distributor Andrews McMeel Syndication dropped Dilbert in response to Adams’ comments. Book publisher Portfolio also dropped a forthcoming non-Dilbert book by Adams that was slated for release that September. Adams defended his remarks, calling them hyperbole, “meaning an exaggeration,” and said his words had been taken out of context. He relaunched the strip as Dilbert Reborn on Locals, a subscription website.
Adams has reportedly been a controversial figure among cartoonists, particularly after he called people not vaccinated against COVID the real “winners” of the pandemic and questioned the official death toll of the Holocaust.
Adams has published several books unrelated to Dilbert, particularly themed around religion. His 2001 novella God’s Debris describes a pandeistic philosophy, while his 2004 novel The Religion War tells the tale of a man on a mission to stop a calamitous war between Christians and Muslims. In 2017, Adams told Bloomberg that his religion-themed books, not Dilbert, would be his “ultimate legacy.”
Commentator on Trump
In 2015, Adams began writing about Trump in blog posts predicting his electoral victory in the 2016 presidential election. Adams endorsed Trump for President, just as he endorsed Republican nominee Mitt Romney for the 2012 election. He also criticized Trump’s opponent and 2016 Democratic nominee whom he’d initially endorsed, Hillary Clinton, suggesting that a Clinton presidency would diminish the status of men.
He has described his views as being “left of” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I, Vt.), who ran in the 2016 Democratic primary. At the same time, Adams said in 2016, “I don’t vote and I am not a member of a political party,” a view he reaffirmed in his 2017 Bloomberg interview.
Adams’ blog posts later evolved into daily videos shared on Periscope, which became an official video podcast in 2018. In 2020, Trump shared on X (then known as Twitter) an episode of the podcast in which Adams mocked then-presidential nominee Joe Biden.
Diagnosed with prostate cancer
In May, after former President Biden revealed his own prostate cancer diagnosis, Adams shared on his podcast that he also has prostate cancer. He told viewers that the cancer had spread to his bones, including his spine, and that taking ivermectin and fenbendazole had not helped. In June, he said he was in so much pain that he had prepared for physician-assisted suicide but was then able to manage his pain through testosterone blockers.
According to Adams, he has already been approved for Pluvicto. The drug was first approved for medical use in the U.S. in March 2022 and in the European Union in December 2022 for patients whose prostate cancer has progressed after previous treatments. In March, its indication was expanded by the FDA to be used by certain adults with metastasized prostate cancer earlier in their treatment journey.
Pluvicto, alongside standard care, has been shown to reduce the risk of progression or death in patients by 28%, according to Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis.
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